Leaderboard Zone

Last Friday Businessweek ran a story on Diaspora, a social platform built from what might be called Facebook anti-matter. It’s a great read that chronicles the project’s extraordinary highs and lows, from Pebble-like Kickstarter success to the loss of a founder to suicide. Given the overwhelming hype around Facebook’s IPO this week, it’s worth remembering such a thing exists – and even though it’s in private beta, Diaspora is one of the largest open source projects going right now, and boasts around 600,000 beta testers.

I’ve watched Diaspora from the sidelines, but anyone who reads this site regularly will know that I’m rooting for it. I was surprised – and pleased – to find out that Diaspora is executing something of a “pivot” – retaining its core philosophy of being a federated platform where “you own your own data” while at the same time adding new Tumblr and Pinterest-like content management features, as well as integration with – gasp! – Facebook. And this summer, the core team behind the service is joining Y Combinator in the Valley – a move that is sure to accelerate its service from private beta to public platform.

I like Diaspora because it’s audacious, it’s driven by passion, and it’s very, very hard to do. After all, who in their right mind would set as a goal taking on Facebook? That’s sort of like deciding to build a better search engine – very expensive, with a high likelihood of failure. But what’s really audacious is the vision that drives Diaspora – that everyone owns their own data, and everyone has the right to do with it what they want. The vision is supported by a federated technology platform – and once you federate, you lose central control as a business. Then, business models get very, very hard. So you’re not only competing against Facebook, you’re also competing against the reality of the marketplace – centralized domains are winning right now (as I pointed out here).

It seems what Diaspora is attempting to do is take the functionality and delight of the dependent web, and mix it with the freedom and choice offered by the independent web. Of course, that sounds pretty darm good to me.

Given the timing of Facebook’s public debut, the move to Y Combinator, and perhaps just my own gut feel, I think Diaspora is one to watch in coming months. As of two days ago, the site is taking registrations for its public debut. Sign up here.

Content Marquee

The Soho Skylight, awaiting its incarnation as site for the 7th annual CM Summit.

As New York City gears up for its annual Internet Week, the team at FMP has been diligently working away on creating another stellar program for our 7th annual CM Summit, held this coming Monday and Tuesday in SoHo.

Last year we eliminated panels from our program, the move was met with great success – attendees love our fast-paced approach, which features short, high-value presentations from leaders in digital marketing and technology platforms, interspersed with conversations with CMOs from Fortune 500 brands and entrepreneurs driving change in digital.

Monday kicks off at 2pm with one of New York City’s media elites — Barry Diller of IAC, Expedia & Trip Advisor. Diller is more recently known for backing the controversial streaming video startup Aereo as well as high-flyer Pinterest. After his conversation, we move into a rapid fire succession of presentations including Joe Frydl, recently appointed SVP of Marketing at FMP, who sets the stage for this year’s theme with his talk on The Law of Content on the Web.

That’s a perfect segueway to our next speaker, Linda Descano, President & CEO of Women & Co., a service of Citi that brings together the voices of independent writers on relevant and thoughtful financial content. Linda is also a Managing Director and the Head of Digital Partnerships for North America Marketing at Citi, driving brand health and customer engagement goals.

After a deep focus on content, we move to the world of analytics with Amy Chang, Head of Product for Google Analytics, who will show and tell the Next Generation of Measurement. Amy is followed by Terence Kawaja of LUMA Partners, who gives his State of the State, a detailed look at today’s marketing landscape in line with the conference theme of Marketing from the 30,000-Foot View. Expect to laugh a few times….

Post refreshments, we continue with a series of conversations with Lisa Weinstein, President of Global Digital & Search at Starcom MediaVest Group; Sarah Bernard, Deputy Director of The White House Office of Digital Strategy; and Alfredo Gangotena, Chief Marketing Officer of MasterCard.

Day one’s sponsor spotlight is Luminate. CEO Bob Lisbonne takes us on a visual journey that highlights New Opportunities for Consumers, Publishers & Brands.

Tuesday, May 15th presents a full conference day that begins at 9am sharp with an intellectual and entertaining conversation with one of Silicon Valley’s most well-connected investors, Ron Conway of SV Angels. From there we move forward with a day centered around the industry’s major technology platforms with presentations from Microsoft, Twitter, Nokia, Tapjoy (a youthful yet successful startup that’s creating a marketplace for mobile games), Salesforce.com, and StumbleUpon.

Marc Speichert, Chief Marketing Officer at L’Oreal USA, not only responsible for driving and enhancing innovation for the company’s Consumer, Luxury, and Professional Products, as well as Active Cosmetics, in this role, Marc also runs Corporate Strategic Marketing, Media & Digital, and Consumer Market Intelligence.

Jim Lanzone, President of CBS Interactive, on a discourse about the current and future state of premium video content and Internet video channels.

Clara Shih, Founder of enterprise social media software company Hearsay Social and New York Times bestselling author of The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Market, Sell and Innovate.

Alison Lewis, who’s official title of SVP of Marketing for North America at The Coca-Cola Company really translates to being the force behind how one of America’s historic companies maintains its brand leadership.

To add a little visionary spice to the mix, I’ll also be interviewing Gil Elbaz, an accomplished entrepreneur and pioneer of natural language technology. As the CEO of Factual, Gil lives in “the data layer,” making data more accessible for machines, developers, and marketers.

Additional companies presenting include The Wyndham Hotel Group, Sharethrough, and Upworthy. These sessions help highlight how existing content around the web can create real business ROI with just the right amount of attention and curation.

Day two’s sponsor spotlight is Meebo. CEO Seth Sternberg will focus on how to Balance User Experience with Revenue Generation.

We bring the event full circle with closing conversations by two well-respected figures in New York’s digital marketing community: Randall Rothenberg, President & CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and Susan Sobbott, President of American Express OPEN.

This year the CM Summit has moved venues, and will be hosted at Skylight Soho (pic above), a creative and beautiful loft space custom-built to accommodate both CM Summit audiences, and the IAB conference which follows.

Larry Lessig is an accomplished author, lawyer, and professor, and until recently, was one of the leading active public intellectuals in the Internet space. But as I wrote in my review of his last book (Is Our Republic Lost?), in the past few years Lessig has changed his focus from Internet law to reforming our federal government.

But that doesn’t mean Lessig has stopped thinking about our industry, as the dialog below will attest. Our conversation came about last month after I finished reading Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2. The original book, written in 1999, is still considered an authoritative text on how the code of computing platforms interacts with our legal and social codes. In 2006, Lessig “crowdsourced” an update to his book, and released it as “Version 2.0.” I’d never read the updated work (and honestly didn’t remember the details of the first book), so finally, six years later, I dove in again.

It’s a worthy dive, but not an easy one. Lessig is a lawyer by nature, and his argument is laid out like proofs in a case. Narrative is sparse, and structure sometimes trumps writing style. But his essential point – that the Internet is not some open “wild west” destined to always be free of regulation, is soundly made. In fact, Lessig argues, the Internet is quite possibly the most regulable technology ever invented, and if we don’t realize that fact, and protect ourselves from it, we’re in for some serious pain down the road. And for Lessig, the government isn’t the only potential regulator. Instead, Lessig argues, commercial interests may become the most pervasive regulators on the Internet.

Indeed, during the seven years between Code’s first version and its second, much had occurred to prove Lessig’s point. But even as Lessig was putting the finishing touches on the second version of his manuscript, a new force was erupting from the open web: Facebook. And a year after that, the iPhone redefined the Internet once again.

In Code, Lessig enumerates several examples of how online services create explicit codes of control – including the early AOL, Second Life, and many others. He takes the reader though important lessons in understanding regulation as more than just governmental – explaining normative (social), market (commercial), and code-based (technological) regulation. He warns that once we commit our lives to commercial services that hold our identity, a major breach of security will most likely force the government into enacting overzealous and anti-constitutional measures (think 9/11 and the Patriot Act). He makes a case for the proactive creation of an intelligent identity layer for the Internet, one that might offer just the right amount of information for the task at hand. In 2006, such an identity layer was a controversial idea – no one wanted the government, for example, to control identity on the web.

But for reasons we’re still parsing as a culture, in the six years since the publication of Code v2, nearly 1 billion of us have become comfortable with Facebook as our defacto identity, and hundreds of millions of us have become inhabitants of Apple’s iOS.

Instead of going into more detail on the book (as I have in many other reviews), I thought I’d reach out to Lessig and ask him about this turn of events. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our dialog. I think you’ll find it provocative.

As to the book: If you consider yourself active in the core issues of the Internet industry, do yourself a favor and read it. It’s worth your time.

Q:After reading your updated Code v2, which among many other things discusses how easily the Internet might become far more regulated than it once was, I found myself scribbling one word in the margins over and over again. That word was “Facebook.”

You and your community updated your 1999 classic in 2006, a year or two before Facebook broke out, and several years before it became the force it is now. In Code you cover the regulatory architectures of places where people gather online, including MUDS, AOL, and the then-hot darling known as Second Life. But the word Facebook isn’t in the text.

What do you make of Facebook, given the framework of Code v2?

Lessig: If I were writing Code v3, there’d be a chapter — right after I explained the way (1) code regulates, and (2) commerce will use code to regulate — titled: “See, e.g., Facebook.” For it strikes me that no phenomena since 2006 better demonstrates precisely the dynamic I was trying to describe. The platform is dominant, and built into the platform are a million ways in which behavior is regulated. And among those million ways are 10 million instances of code being use to give to Facebook a kind of value that without code couldn’t be realized. Hundreds of millions from across the world live “in” Facebook. It more directly (regulating behavior) than any government structures and regulates their lives while there. There are of course limits to what Facebook can do. But the limits depend upon what users see. And Facebook has not yet committed itself to the kind of transparency that should give people confidence. Nor has it tied itself to the earlier and enabling values of the internet, whether open source or free culture.

Q:Jonathan Zittrain wrote his book two years after Code v2, and warned of non-generative systems that might destroy the original values of the Internet. Since then, Apple iOS (the “iWorld”) and Facebook have blossomed, and show no signs of slowing down. Do you believe we’re in a pendulum swing, or are you more pessimistic – that consumers are voting with their dollars, devices, and data for a more closed ecosystem?

Lessig: The trend JZ identified is profound and accelerating, and most of us who celebrate the “free and open” net are simply in denial. Facebook now lives oblivious to the values of open source software, or free culture. Apple has fully normalized the iNannyState. And unless Google’s Android demonstrates how open can coexist with secure, I fear the push away from our past will only continue. And then when our i9/11 event happens — meaning simply a significant and destructive cyber event, not necessarily tied to any particular terrorist group — the political will to return to control will be almost irresistible.

The tragedy in all this is that it doesn’t have to be this way. If we could push to a better identity layer in the net, we could get both better privacy and better security. But neither side in this extremist’s battle is willing to take the first step towards this obvious solution. And so in the end I fear the extremists I like least will win.

Q:You seem profoundly disappointed in our industry. What can folks who want to make a change do?

Lessig: Not at all. The industry is doing what industry does best — doing well, given the rules as they are. What industry is never good at (and is sometimes quite evil at) is identifying the best mix of rules. Government is supposed to do something with that. Our problem is that we have today such a fundamentally dysfunctional government that we don’t even recognize the idea that it might have a useful role here. So we get stuck in these policy-dead-ends, with enormous gains to both sides left on the table.

And that’s only to speak about the hard problems — which security in the Net is. Much worse (and more frustrating) are the easy problems which the government also can’t solve, not because the answer isn’t clear (again, these are the easy problems) but because the incumbents are so effective at blocking the answer that makes more sense so as to preserve the answer that makes them more dollars. Think about the “copyright wars” — practically every sane soul is now focused on a resolution of that war that is almost precisely what the disinterested souls were arguing a dozen years ago (editor’s note: abolishing DRM). Yet the short-termism of the industry wouldn’t allow those answers a dozen years ago, so we have had an completely useless war which has benefited no one (save the lawyers-as-soldiers in that war). We’ve lost a decade of competitive innovation in ways to spur and spread content in ways that would ultimately benefit creators, because the dinosaurs owned the lobbyists.

—-

I could have gone on for some time with Lessig, but I wanted to stop there, and invite your questions in the comments section. Lessig is pretty busy with his current work, which focuses on those lobbyists and the culture of money in Congress, but if he can find the time, he’ll respond to your questions in the comments below, or to me in email, and I’ll update the post.

Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget has been on my reading list for nearly two years, and if nothing else comes of this damn book I’m trying to write, it’ll be satisfying to say that I’ve made my way through any number of important works that for one reason or another, I failed to read up till now.

I met Jaron in the Wired days (that’d be 20 years ago) but I don’t know him well – as with Sherry Turkle and many others, I encountered him through my role as an editor, then followed his career with interest as he veered from fame as a virtual reality pioneer into his current role as chief critic of all things “Web 2.0.” Given my role in that “movement” – I co-founded the Web 2 conferences with Tim O’Reilly in 2004 – it’d be safe to assume that I disagree with most of what Lanier has to say.

I don’t. Not entirely, anyway. In fact, I came away, as I did with Turkle’s work, feeling a strange kinship with Lanier. But more on that in a moment.

In essence, You Are Not A Gadget is a series of arguments, some concise, others a bit shapeless, centering on one theme: Individual human beings are special, and always will be, and digital technology is not a replacement for our humanity. In particular, Lanier is deeply skeptical of any kind of machine-based mechanism that might be seen as replacing or diminishing our specialness, which over the past decade, Lanier sees happening everywhere.

Lanier is most eloquent when he describes, late in the book, what he believes humans to be: the result of a very long, very complicated interaction with reality (sure, irony alert given Lanier’s VR fame, but it makes sense when you read the book):

I believe humans are the result of billions of years of implicit, evolutionary study in the school of hard knocks. The cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality.

Lanier worries we’re losing that sense of reality. From crowdsourcing and Wikipedia to the Singularity movement, he argues that we’re starting to embrace a technological philosophy that can only lead to loss. Early in the book, he writes:

“…certain specific, popular internet designs of the moment…tend to pull us into life patterns that gradually degrade the ways in which each of us exists as an individual. These unfortunate designs are more oriented toward treating people as relays in a global brain….(this) leads to all sorts of maladies….”

Lanier goes on to specific examples, including the online tracking associated with advertising, the concentration of power in the hands of the “lords of the clouds” such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and even Goldman Sachs, the loss of analog musical notation, the rise of locked in, fragile, and impossibly complicated software programs; and ultimately, the demise of the middle class. It’s a potentially powerful argument, and one I wish Lanier had made more completely. Instead, after reading his book, I feel forewarned, but not quite forearmed.

Lanier singles out many of our shared colleagues – the leaders of the Web 2.0 movement – as hopelessly misguided, labeling them “cynernetic totalists” who believe technology will solve all problems, including that of understanding humanity and consciousness. He worries about the fragmentation of our online identity, and warns that Web 2 services – from blogs to Facebook – lead us to leave little pieces of ourselves everywhere, feeding a larger collective, but resulting in no true value to the individual.

If you read my recent piece On Thneeds and the “Death of Display”, this might sound familiar, but I’m not sure I’d be willing to go as far as Lanier does in claiming all this behavior of ours will end up impoverishing our culture forever. I tend to be an optimist, Lanier, less so. He rues the fact that the web never implemented Ted Nelson’s vision of true hypertext – where the creator is remunerated via linked micro-transactions, for example. I think there were good reasons this system didn’t initially win, but there’s no reason to think it never will.

Lanier, an accomplished musician – though admittedly not a very popular one – is convinced that popular culture has been destroyed by the Internet. He writes:

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.

As an avid music fan, I’m not convinced. But Lanier goes further:

Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence…the deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits.

Wow! That’s some powerful stuff. But after reading the book, I wasn’t convinced about that, either, though Lanier raises many interesting questions along the way. One of them boils down to the concept of smell – the one sense that we can’t represent digitally. In a section titled “What Makes Something Real Is That It Is Impossible to Represent It To Completion,” Lanier writes:

It’s easy to forget that the very idea of a digital expression involves a trade-off with metaphysical overtones. A physical oil painting cannot convey an image created in another medium; it is impossible to make an oil painting look just like an ink drawing, for instance, or vice versa. But a digital image of sufficient resolution can capture any kind of perceivable image—or at least that’s how you’ll think of it if you believe in bits too much. Of course, it isn’t really so. A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation, not a real thing. A real painting is a bottomless mystery, like any other real thing. An oil painting changes with time; cracks appear on its face. It has texture, odor, and a sense of presence and history.

This really resonates with me. In particular, the part about the odor. Turns out, odor is a pretty interesting subject. Our sense of smell is inherently physical – actual physical molecules of matter are required to enter our bodies and “mate” with receptors in our nervous system in order for us to experience an odor:

Olfaction, like language, is built up from entries in a catalog, not from infinitely morphable patterns. …the world’s smells can’t be broken down into just a few numbers on a gradient; there is no “smell pixel.”

Lanier suspects – and I find the theory compelling – that olfaction is deeply embedded in what it means to be human. Certainly such a link presents a compelling thought experiment as we transition to a profoundly digital world. I am very interested in what it means for our culture that we are truly “becoming digital,” that we are casting shadows of data in nearly everything we do, and that we are struggling to understand, instrument, and respond socially to this shift. I’m also fascinated by the organizations attempting to leverage that data, from the Internet Big Five to the startups and behind the scenes players (Palantir, IBM, governments, financial institutions, etc) who are profiting from and exploiting this fact.

But I don’t believe we’re in early lockdown mode, destined to digital serfdom. I still very much believe in the human spirit, and am convinced that if any company, government, or leader pushes too hard, we will “sniff them out,” and they will be routed around. Lanier is less complacent: he is warning that if we fail to wake up, we’re in for a very tough few decades, if not worse.

Lanier and I share any number of convictions, regardless. His prescriptions for how to insure we don’t become “gadgets” might well have been the inspiration for my post Put Your Taproot Into the Independent Web, for example (he implores us to create, deeply, and not be lured into expressing ourselves solely in the templates of social networking sites). And he reminds readers that he loves the Internet, and pines, a bit, for the way it used to be, before Web 2 and Facebook (and one must assume, Apple), rebuilt it into forms he now decries.

I pine a bit myself, but remain (perhaps foolishly) optimistic that the best of what we’ve created together will endure, even as we journey onward to discover new ways of valuing what it means to be a person. And I feel lucky to know that I can reach out to Jaron – and I have – to continue this conversation, and report the results of our dialog on this site, and in my own book.

As readers are realizing, I’m posting photos here first, then using this as the basis for exports to other services like Twitter or Pinterest. It will be a few days before I have a “non photos” RSS feed for you to follow, forgive the interruption with non-work related stuff. But, it was a big weekend.

It started with my daughter winning the county championships in the 1oom dash for the third year in a row. Wow!

Then my son led his Eagle Project, with a crew of eight who cleared brush and built a new set of steps on a local trail near Mount Tamalpais. A major milestone.

Then he participated in the NorCal Championship mountain bike race, which was held in Marin for the first time ever.

In between, I went to an extraordinary fundraiser for Alzheimer’s research, and got to talk baseball with Giants manager Bruce Bochy and listen to Tony Bennet sing “I left my heart in San Francisco.”

Lots of Valley brass there (it was held on Sand Hill Road), it’s amazing to realize how little is known about this disease, which costs the US $200 billion a year, and effects the lives of tens of millions of us each year. For more info, check out this short video, also embedded below. Eye opening.

It’s all over the news these days: Display advertising is dead. Or put more accurately, the world of “boxes and rectangles” is dead. No one pays attention to banner ads, the reasoning goes, and the model never really worked in the first place (except for direct response). Brand marketers are demanding more for their money, and “standard display” is simply not delivering. After nearly 20 years*, it’s time to bury the banner, and move on to….

…well, to something else. Mostly, if you believe the valuations these days, to big platforms that have their own proprietary ad systems.

All over the industry, you’ll find celebration of new advertising-driven platforms that have eschewed the “boxes and rectangles” model. Twitter makes money off its native “promoted” suite of marketing tools. Tumblr just this week rolled out a similar offering. Pinterest recently hired Facebook’s original monetization wizard to create its own advertising model, separate from standard display. And of course there’s Facebook, which has gone so far as to call its new products “Featured Stories” (as opposed to “Ads” – which is what they are.) Lastly, we mustn’t forget the grandaddy of native advertising platforms, Google, whose search ads redefined the playing field more than a decade ago (although AdSense, it must be said, is very much in the “standard display” business).

Together, these platforms comprise what I’ve come to call the “dependent web,” and they live in a symbiotic relationship with what I call the “independent web.”

But there’s a very big difference between the two when it comes to revenue and perceived value. Dependent web companies are, in short, killing it. Facebook is about to go public at a valuation of $100 billion. Twitter is valued at close to $10 billion. Pinterest is rumored to be worth $4 billion, and who knows what Tumblr’s worth now – it was nearly $1 billion, on close to no revenues, last Fall. And of course Google has a market cap of around $200 billion.

Independent web publishers? With a few exceptions, they’re not killing it. They aren’t massively scaled platforms, after all, they’re often one or two person shops. If “display is dead,” then, well – they’re getting killed.

That’s because, again with few exceptions, independent web sites rely on the “standard display” model to scratch out at least part of a living. And that standard display model was not built to leverage the value of great content sites: engagement with audience. Boxes and rectangles on the side or top of a website simply do not deliver against brand advertising goals. Like it or not, boxes and rectangles have for the most part become the province of direct response advertising, or brand advertising that pays, on average, as if it’s driven by direct response metrics. And unless you’re running a high-traffic site about asbestos lawsuits, that just doesn’t pay the bills for content sites.

Hence, the rolling declaration of display’s death – often by independent industry news sites plastered with banners, boxes and rectangles.

But I don’t think online display is dead. It just needs to be rethought, re-engineered, and reborn. Easy, right?

Well, no, because brand marketers want scale and proof of ROI – and given that any new idea in display has to break out of the box-and-rectangle model first, we’ve got a chicken and egg problem with both scale and proof of value.

But I’ve noticed some promising sprigs of green pushing through the earth of late. First of all, let’s not forget the growth and success of programmatic buying across those “boxes and rectangles.” Using data and real time bidding, demand- and supply-side platforms are growing very quickly, and while the average CPM is low, there is a lot of promise in these new services – so much so, that FMP recently joined forces with one of the best, Lijit Networks. Another promising development is the video interstitial. Once anathema to nearly every publisher on the planet, this full page unit is now standard on the New York Times, Wired, Forbes, and countless other publishing sites. And while audiences may balk at seeing a full-page video ad after clicking from a search engine or other referring agent, the fact is, skipping the ad is about as hard as turning the page in a magazine. And in magazines, full page ads work for marketers.

Another is what many are now calling “native advertising” (sure to be confused with Twitter, Tumblr, and others’ native advertising solutions…) Over at Digiday, which has been doing a bang up job covering the display story, you’ll see debate about the growth of publisher-based “native advertising units,” which are units that run in the editorial well, and are often populated with advertiser-sponsored content. FMP has been doing this kind of advertising for nearly three years, and of course it pioneered the concept of content marketing back in 2006. The key to success here, we’ve found, is getting context right, at scale, and of course providing transparency (IE, don’t try to fool an audience, they’re far smarter than that.)

And lastly, there are the new “Rising Star” units from the IAB (where I am a board member). These are, put quite simply, reimagined, larger and more interactive boxes and rectangles. A good step, but not a panacea.

So as much as I am rooting for these new approaches to display, and expect that they will start to be combined in ways that really pay off for publishers, they have a limitation: they’re focused on what I’ll call a “site-specific” model: for a publisher to get rewarded for creating great content, that publisher must endeavor to bring visitors to their site so those visitors can see the ads. If we look toward the future, that’s not going to be enough. In an ideal Internet world, great content is rewarded for being shared, reposted, viewed elsewhere and yes, even “liked.”

Up to now, that reward has had one single currency: Traffic back to the site.

Think of the largest referrers of traffic to the “rest of the web” – who are they? Yep – the very same companies with huge valuations – Google, Facebook, Twitter, and now Pinterest. What do they have in common? They’ve figured out a way to leverage the content created by the “rest of the web” and resell it to marketers at scale and for value (or, at least VCs believe they will soon). It’s always been an implicit deal, starting with search and moving into social: We cull, curate, and leverage your content, and in return, we’ll send traffic back to your site.

But given that we’re in for an extended transition from boxes and rectangles to ideas that, we hope, are better over time, well, that traffic deal just isn’t enough. It’s time to imagine bigger things.

Before we do, let’s step back for a moment and consider the independent web site. The…content creator. The web publisher. The talent, if you will. The person with a voice, an audience, a community. The hundreds of thousands (millions, really) of folks who, for good or bad, have plastered banners all over their site in the hope that perhaps the checks might get a bit bigger next month. (Of course this includes traditional media sites, like publishers who made their nut in print, for example). To me, these people comprise the equivalent of forests in the Internet’s ecosystem. They create the oxygen that feeds much of our world: Great content, great engagement, and great audiences.

Perhaps I’m becoming a cranky old man, a Lorax, if you must, but I’m going to jump up on a stump right now and say it: curation-based platform models that harvest the work of great content creators, creating “Thneeds” along the way, are failing to see the forest for the trees. Their quid pro quo deal to “send more traffic” ain’t enough.**

It’s time that content creators derived real value from the platforms they feed. A new model is needed, and if one doesn’t emerge (or is obstructed by the terms of service of large platforms), I worry about the future of the open web itself. If we, as an industry, don’t get just a wee bit better at taking care of content creators, we’re going to destroy our own ecosystem – and we’ll watch the Pinterests, Twitters, and yes, even the Google and Facebooks of the world deteriorate for lack of new content to curate.

So I’m here to say not only do I care, so do the hundreds of people working at Federated Media Publishing and Lijit, and at a burgeoning ecosystem of companies, publishers, and marketers who are coming to realize it’s time to wake up from our “standard display” dream and create some new models. It’s not the big platforms’ job to create that model – but it will be their job to not stand in the way of it.

So what might a new approach look like? Well first and foremost, it doesn’t mean abandoning the site-specific approach. Instead, I suggest we augment that revenue stream with another, one that ties individual “atomic units” of content to similar “atomic units” of marketing messaging, so that together they can travel the Seussian highways of the social web with a business model intact.

Because if the traffic referral game has proven anything to us as publishers, it’s that great content doesn’t want to be bound to one site. The rise of Pinterest, among others, proves this fact. Ideally, content should be shared, mixed, mashed, and reposted – it wants to flow through the Internet like water. This was the point of RSS, after all – a technology that has actually been declared dead more often than the lowly display banner. (For those of you too young to recall RSS, it’s a technology that allows publishers to share their content as “feeds” to any third party.)

RSS has, in the main, “failed” as a commercial entity because publishers realized they couldn’t make money by allowing people to consume their content “offsite.” The tyranny of the site-specific model forced most commercial publishers to use RSS only for display of headlines and snippets of text – bait, if you will, to bring audiences back to the site.

I’ve written about the implications of RSS and its death over and over again, because I love its goal of weaving content throughout the Internet. But and each time I’ve considered RSS, I’ve found myself wanting for a solution to its ills. I love the idea of content flowing any and everywhere around the Internet, but I also understand and sympathize with the content creator’s dilemma: If my content is scattered to the Internet’s winds, consumed on far continents with no remuneration to me, I can’t make a living as a content creator. So it’s no wonder that the creator swallows hard, and limits her RSS feed in the hopes that traffic will rise on her site (a few intrepid souls, like me, keep their RSS feeds “full text.” But I don’t rely on this site, directly, to make a living.)

So let’s review. We now have three broken or limping models in independent Internet publishing: the traffic-hungry site-specific content model, the “standard display” model upon which it depends, and the RSS model, which failed due to lack of “monetization.”

But inside this seeming mess, if you stare long and hard enough, there are answers staring back at you. In short, it’s time to leverage the big platforms for more than just traffic. It’s time to do what the biggest holders of IP (the film and TV folks) have already done – go where the money is. But this time, the approach needs to be different.

I’ve already hinted at it above: Wrap content with appropriate underwriting, and set it free to roam the Internet. Of course, such a system will have to navigate business process rules (the platforms’ Terms of Service), and break free of scale and ROI constraints. I believe this can be done.

But given that I’m already at 2500 words, I think I’ll be writing about that approach in a future post. Stay tuned, and remember – “Unless….”

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*As a co-founder of Wired, I had a small part to play in the banner’s birth – the first banner ran on HotWired in 1994. It had a 78% clickthrough rate.

**Using ad networks, the average small publisher earns about seventy-five cents per thousand on her display ads. Let’s do the math. Let’s say Molly the Scone Blogger gets an average of 50,000 page views a month, pretty good for a food blogger. We know the average ad network pays about 65 to 85 cents per thousand page views at the moment (for reasons explained above, despite the continuing focus of the industrial ad technology complex, which is working to raise those prices with data and context). And let’s say Molly puts two ads per page on her site. That means she has one hundred “thousands” to sell, at around 75 cents a thousand. This means Molly gets a check for about $75 each month. Now, Molly loves her site, and loves her audience and community, and wants to make enough to do it more. Since her only leverage is increased traffic, she will labor at Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, promoting her content and doing her best to gain more audience.

Perhaps she can double her traffic, and her monthly income might go from $75 to $150. That helps with the groceries, but it’s a terrible return on invested time. So what might Molly do? Well, if she can’t join a higher-paying network like FMP, she may well decide to abandon content creation all together. And when she stops investing in her own site, guess what happens? She’s not creating new content for Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Google to harvest, and she’s not using those platforms to distribute her content.

For the past seven years, it’s been FMP’s business to get people like Molly paid a lot more than 75 cents per thousand audience members. We’re proud of the hundred plus million dollars we’ve injected into the Independent web, but I have to be honest with you. There are way more Mollys in the world than FMP can help – at least under current industry conditions. And while we’ve innovated like crazy to create value beyond standard banners, it’s going to take more to insure content creators get paid appropriately. It’s time to think outside the box.

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Special thanks to folks who have been helping me think through this issue, including Deanna Brown and the FMP team, Randall Rothenberg of the IAB, Brian Monahan, Chas Edwards, Jeff Dachis, Brian Morrissey, and many, many more.

I’ve become increasingly troubled by the “data traps” springing up all over AppWorld and the Internet, and while I’ve been pretty vocal about their downsides, I also use them quite a bit – especially for photos. That, I hope, is about to end.

However, I’m afraid it means you, dear reader, are going to be seeing a few more pictures of Mount Tamalpais and my favorite wines here on Searchblog.

Allow me to explain. I have done a pretty good job of partitioning my life digitally, posting utterances and stories that I’m happy to share with anyone on Twitter, leaving a few sparse comments and “Likes” on Facebook (I’m not a huge user of the service, I’ll be honest), and sending any number of photos to thousands of “followers” on Instagram and Tumblr.

The fact is, none of these services comprise what I call the Independent Web, as I describe it in this post: Put Your Taproot Into the Independent Web. And over time, it’s come to bother me that my content and my usage has been aggregated into a deal that feels out of balance. These companies are getting huge valuations (and exits) on the back of our collective usage (often with little or no revenue model). And what are we getting back? A free service. One that is constantly taking data from our interactions, and leveraging that data for ever higher valuations.

The Lobby of AT&T, where I visited last week

If you’re a professional content creator, as I am, there’s only so long you can go without feeling a bit…used.

I’d be OK with this tradeoff if these services made it easy to export my data outside of their walls, but so far, that’s not been the case. I’ve got hundreds of shots stuck on Twitpic, for example (and I know, you can runs some kind of script, but I’m not really going to figure out how to do that). And about that many on Instagram. Plus scores on Tumblr, which I used, briefly, as a kind of photo blog (the 500K image limit in email stopped that habit).

So as a way of putting my money where my mouth is, I’m going to start sending all photos that I care to share publicly to this site. WordPress has a new version of its app that promises to make photo uploads pretty easy from my phone (fingers are crossed, I haven’t used it yet). Consider the shots “Unicorn chasers,” if you will, respites between my half-baked predictions, long rants on identity, or musings on antiquities from the future. If the spirit moves me, I’ll then push those same photos to Tumblr or Instagram (or whatever comes next). At least this way, the photo “lives” on my site, and whatever initial pageviews and data is created stays on this site, where I can leverage it to support my work (IE, show ads next to them, and/or understand consumption in some way that helps me create a better site).

This approach, for example, will allow me to “pin” these photos to Pinterest, and any traffic from Pinterest will come back to this site, rather than Instagram or Tumblr.

Now, I can’t exactly replicate what Twitter and Facebook have created here on this blog, so I’ll continue to use those platforms as I have in the past. For me, I mostly use social services to point to things I think my “followers” may find interesting out there on the web. Going forward, that will include my public photos – on my own site.

I hope seeing the odd photo now and again – even if they’re a bit out of context – won’t turn you off as a reader. I figure I’ll only post shots that I’d be happy to send to Twitter anyway, where I have a very large and very vocal audience in any case. As always, tell me what you think….and forgive my technical lameness as I get started. I’m working out the kinks (anyone know how to make sure I get proper right margins on photos in WordPress, and stylized captions?!).

Ever since the Pebble watch became an cause célèbre in tech circles for its kickass Kickstarter moves (it’s raised almost $7mm dollars and counting), something’s been nagging me about the company and its product.

It’s now Valley legend that the company had to turn to Kickstarter to get its working capital – more than 46,000 folks have backed Pebble, and will soon be proudly sporting their spiffy new iPhone-powered watches as a result. Clearly Pebble has won – both financially, as well as in the court of public opinion. I spoke to one early investor (through Y-Combinator) who had nothing but good things to say about the company and its founders.

But why, I wondered, were mainstream VCs not backing Pebble once it became clear the company was on a path to success?

The reasons I read in press coverage – that VCs tend to not like untested hardware/platform plays, that retail products have low margins, etc., all sounded reasonable, but not enough. In this environment, there had to be more going on.

Now, I don’t know enough to claim this as anything more than a theory, but it’s a Friday, so allow me to speculate: Perhaps one reason VCs don’t want to invest in Pebble is because they fear Apple.

Here’s why. If you watch the video explaining Pebble, it become pretty clear that the watch is, in essence, a new form factor for the iPhone. It’s smaller, it’s more use-case defined, but that’s what it is: A smaller mirror of your iPhone, strapped to you wrist. Pebble uses bluetooth connectivity to access the iPhone’s native capabilities, and then displays data, apps, and services on its high-resolution e-paper screen. It even has its own “app store” and (upcoming) SDK/API so people can write native apps to the device.

In short, Pebble is an iPhone for your wrist. And Apple doesn’t own it.

If we’ve learned anything about Apple over the years, it’s that Apple is driven by its hardware business. It makes its profits by selling hardware – and it’s built a beautiful closed software ecosystem to insure those hardware sales. Pebble forces an interesting question: Does Apple care about new form factors for hardware? Or is it content to build out just the “core” hardware platform, and allow anyone to innovate in new hardware instances? Would Apple be cool with someone building, say, a larger form factor of the iPhone, perhaps tablet-sized, driven by your iPhone?

I don’t know the answer to that question (and doubt Apple would answer my call asking such a question), so I’ll toss it out to you. What do you all think? Is Pebble playing with fire here? Would Apple ever change its developer terms of services to cut the new company off?